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When I wrote a story this week about the situation of the building at 401 Richmond St. W., I cited a number so “unthinkable” that I used it to lead off my discussion: In 1994, I wrote, Margie Zeidler purchased the massive former factory office complex for $150,000. I drew attention to it because it seemed incredible. The problem is that it wasn’t credible. It was false.

“We purchased the building for $1,500,000 in 1994 (not $150,000),” Zeidler wrote to me this week. “Even $1.5 million is a ridiculously small number for a 200,000 square foot building,” she went on — and she’s right, when you also consider the building was only a few short blocks from the financial district. Even in 1994, that was a steal.

But what it was not was $150,000, which is absurd. This corrected information changes nothing much about the broader point I was making in the column, about how property tax increases based on assessed property value threaten a social enterprise business model. And yet it does change something: the cheaper-than-a-house number I had was so over-the-top (or under-the-bottom, I guess) that it attracts attention in a way a number in the millions is not. I apologize to readers for misleading them, and spreading what appears to have become, in some circles, a Toronto urbanist urban myth.

What I find interesting is that I first heard this low number more than a decade ago, when someone I spoke to for a 2003 story about the then-under-construction Distillery District confidently told me about it. I put it in a story for Eye Weekly back then, and a fact checker confirmed it. No one drew my attention to the error back then. I’ve been hearing it from others and repeating it in conversation ever since — often to people who already think they know about the $150,000 story and consider it a well-known fact.

When I went to write about it again this week, I didn’t trust my memory. I looked it up. And I saw it there in a Globe and Mail Report on Business story from 2002, in the midst of a number-heavy breakdown of Zeidler’s business model. “In 1994, during a weak real estate market, Margie Zeidler purchased a 200,000-square-foot warehouse on Toronto’s Richmond Street West for $150,000.”

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The same number also appeared in the 2005 Coach House Press book uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, in chapter-long profile of the Zeidler family that draws on interviews with the Zeidlers themselves — though apparently not for this fact.

It seems likely to me in retrospect that the Globe, at some point, dropped a zero in a typo or editing error back in 2002, and that was the source of whoever relayed it to me, but also the easy-to-Google source that confirmed the information when I and my editors later went to check it. It seems easy to see how others subsequently hearing it would be able to see it confirmed online there, and then in my own piece repeating it. Quite by accident, a real-estate urban legend too good to be true circulated (with my unwitting help).

Still, when I recalled it this week to write about it, I was so astonished again by the number that I wandered around the office telling colleagues: can you believe this? They all shook their heads: hard to believe. That, if nothing else, should have been my reminder to call Margie Zeidler to confirm it personally.

It is another reminder to me that for many journalists, often the things we think we already know are the ones it is most important to double check, because those are things it’s easy to scan over when we’re trying to apply our truth-detector to unfamiliar new information. And the even more obvious lesson is that the most extraordinary pieces of information are the ones we should go to the most extraordinary lengths to confirm. A phone call to Zeidler, to be certain, would not have been an extraordinary measure, it should have been routine. But I didn’t make it.

Zeidler also clarifies a further point, about a reference I made to her involvement in the renovation of the Gladstone Hotel: “While I did purchase the Gladstone in 2000, I passed the job over to my sister — Christina — almost immediately, who renovated it and created the vision for it. I’ve really had no input in its progression. I just don’t want to take credit for someone else’s good work.”

The truth is important in this business, and I hope to try to tell it as clearly as I can. I make mistakes more often than I’d like to, and I always hate it when I do — even more so in a case like this where it turns out I’ve been participating in the spread of a wrong piece of information for more than a decade. But I’m happy to have the chance to set the record straight.

I’m also happy to be able to report that there is some hope of help for the tenants of 401 Richmond, who really do face tax increases as steep and threatening as I noted in the same column. The situation for them and of buildings like theirs is attracting attention. NDP leader Andrea Horwath issued an open letter to the premier on Tuesday calling for immediate attention to the issue, ensuring political pressure is on. And local city councillor Joe Cressy contacted me to say he is working on it. “While you are absolutely right that this is and should be in the province’s hands, rest assured that the city will not let 401 Richmond fall victim to ridiculous tax policy. I will find a short-term fix, while we continue to work on longer term provincial solutions. Stay tuned.”

I will, and I expect from the response to that column many readers will stay tuned, too.

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